April 26, 2006

[I]n the final stages of pregnancy, high-ranking females provide their developing offspring with higher levels of androgen—a male sex hormone associated with aggression—than lower-ranking mothers provide to their developing young....

But providing the extra hormones takes a toll on the mother. The dose of androgen that she received from her own alpha mother damages her ovaries, making it difficult to conceive.

It also causes female reproductive organs to grow. A lot. Her clitoris, which contains the birthing canal, protrudes 7 inches from her body.

"Imagine giving birth through a penis," said study co-author Kay Holekamp of Michigan State University. "It's really weird genitalia, but it seems to work. Although giving birth through a 'penis' isn't a trivial problem."

What I find most interesting is that the female is deploying the male hormones that keep her lineage dominant -- at great personal sacrifice to her, wrecking her sex organs for the family good. Of course, none of it is voluntary.

It is an odd biological quirk Ann (gimme creds for getting it right this time) and the insinuation in the article is that it's getting worse.

As far as the production of the male hormone, thats not uncommon, women, as in humans, go through cycles that temporarily SUPPRESS the production of estrogen, and replace the necessary physical stimuli with the non sexual hormone, which name I forget (as I understand) though not nearly to the same degree.

Perhaps the matriarch is trying to promote the production of males, which doesn't seem right, because I remember in a bio/zoo class from highschool, I watched the documentary "eternal enemies" about Lions and Hyena's, you know the one with antwadimaela (he who walks with fire, I believe is the translation) as the prime male lion. Anyways, the female hyena's are just as active in the hounding of the lions and other fights, though men are more aggressive.

Maybe the reason that hyena's have created a female dominant, and breeder profile (though that profile isn't absolute, other females sometimes mate, though they are often chased out (if I remember correctly) when they dare to become fertile, anyways, maybe they became a Matriarchial pack is because the dominant female, with the production of excessive male hormones, is identified as a top male competitor. Perhaps some odd mutation from forever ago, where a female ended up not just suppressing female hormones at the time of fertility, but compensating with an excessive release of male hormones, making them ultra sexy, and also, ultra "tough male" or whatever, so that now, all hyena's are now just as bad ass as the men, and the men just love those lovely huge lady parts.

I don't know, but there are a lot of bizarre aspects about it, especially considering that since hyena's are Mammals, they aren't THAT far related from us, no matter how big their chickdicks. (does that offend?

I'm telling you all....if street slang were used you'd all be titillated by now.

Truly, I had an 8:00 am high-school biology course taught by a little old lady (back then 60-year-olds didn't look the way they do today)......who used nothing but street slang to describe the various parts.

It certainly woke all of us at that hour of the morning.

Pretty trippy, and of course, she got away with it because of her age. If it had been a young, good-looking guy, I'm sure someone would've complained. Maybe not.

It makes a difference.

You want to make this stuff sexy....use spicy language to describe it.

Now consider the predicament of the golden mole. A primative insectivore from Africa that has a cloaca. Yep, piss, shit, and puppies through the same hole. And not the eggs of a monotreme, or the comparatively undeveloped young of a marsupial, we're talking fairly well developed kids here.

What I find most interesting is that the female is deploying the male hormones that keep her lineage dominant -- at great personal sacrifice to her, wrecking her sex organs for the family good. Of course, none of it is voluntary.

You know, you don't consent to random inheritance from billionaire relatives you didn't realize you had. And you do consent to dentral dirlling. So I'm not so sure why consent is the end all and be all.

I think if I was a woman Hyena, I'd probably look to get into cross dressing or some oher deviant activity, and just avoid the normal pickup scene around the local gazelle carcas. "Hey, why is Alvina dressed up as a Wildebeast?" "I dunno. It's pretty weird." "Yeah, amazing how some people get their kicks, huh?" "Yeah, I just don't get it."

On the other hand, it could be that we're all anthropomorphising just a wee bit excessively here. It's possible that hyenas don't worry about all this too much, and have evolved some coping mechanism. Hey, I wonder if there's anything hallucenogenic about a three day old Gnu carcass...

With two billion base pairs forming our combinatorics, we're all inheritors of billionaires in the random heritance of assortative mating.

It's not like hyenas evidence consent by signing pre-nups, and even if they did, we still wouldn't know what it's like to a hyena to be a hyena in a hyena-consenting cosmos (a nod to Nagel's essay on bats).

In a Posner-Benthemite economics-of-consent transaction, female hyena consent to sex could be a separate stage than her consent to the deployment of lineage dominant hormones (pretending there's a naturopathic morning-after hyena pill); but, as a strictly adaptive feature, the mother might want to know whether her decision to forgo the expense of hormone investment to avoid personal harm to herself would outweigh the corresponding decrease in survival chances (survival = viability to reproduction) of her lineage.

Even if specific individuals in the populations of human and hyenas might make such calculations, it's arguable whether whole populations could do so, since strong evidence of metrics in kin selected reciprocal altruism hints that altruistic forms of self-sacrifice are hard wired, and that without benefit of reading Cicero on maternal love.

While the economics of love are murky, the case for evolutionary love is open.

What's equally amazing is how the hyenas have sex. The female hyena has a 7 inch long clitoris and no vagina.

.."The female's bizarre reproductive tract, entered and exited through the phallus instead of directly-the vagina entrance being blocked by a false scrotum and testes-makes copulation complicated. When hyenas mate, only the male has an erection-the female's phallus is slack, the prepuce a wrinkled ring around the enlarged urethra. The male has only to slide beneath the female to enter, an operation assisted by the upward angle of the fully erect penis; following which, he straightens into a normal mating stance.Female dominance imposes unusual diffidence and patience on males. Their obvious fear of female aggression makes courtship an often amusing spectacle."..